The red planet was within his reach. As an interplanetary navigator, Cheikh Modibo Diarra could beam in a NASA landing probe on Mars, but as interim prime minister of Mali, he soon discovered his own limits and those of the military that installed him.

It is unclear why anyone would rely on Mali's generals. Hard up for cash, they sold their weapons on the black market; they put imaginary soldiers on the books and pocketed their real salaries.

Thousands flee … a Tuareg nomad near a mosque in Timbuktu, where Islamist radicals have taken over. Photo: Reuters

When Tuareg separatists seized the north of the country earlier this year, the military cut and ran. Before anyone could say Timbuktu, Islamist radicals slipped in behind the Tuareg to take control of a swathe of country about the size of France.

In a bid to save face, the military marched on Bamako, the capital, to demand new equipment. But once there they staged a coup, then thought better of it - and installed the hapless Diarra to give the appearance of a civilian entity.

But still the incompetence of the military continued. When 16 mullahs from neighbouring Mauritania ventured to Bamako in September with ''messages of peace, fraternity and tolerance'', the Malian forces decided they had to be allies of the Islamists holding the north of the country - so they executed all of them.

This week, just as Diarra was showing signs of carving out some political space for himself, the generals bundled him out of office, as quickly as they had bundled him in.

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With so much happening elsewhere in the world, why does Mali matter?

Answering that question in September, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, zeroed in on the fabled Malian city of Timbuktu as the essence of remoteness - ''a mythical, faraway place located on the boundaries of our collective consciousness''.

He said that Mali, which straddles the southern flank of the Sahara Desert, is emerging as one of our newest humanitarian disasters - remote and beyond the reach of sensible authority, the north of the country has become the new assembly point for the remnants of al-Qaeda, its affiliates and other jihadist wannabes. The risk is a new arc of instability, extending west to Mauritania and east through Niger, Chad and Sudan to the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Aden, Guterres writes.

And, if all that sounds too macro, consider the plight of more than 300,000 locals who have fled as the Islamists reportedly imposed a Taliban-style regime of radical Islamic law and a social code as brutal as it is outlandish.

Petty criminals have been strung up in a town square, to have a hand and a foot chopped off with ''giant scissors'' that a local blacksmith was ordered to make; women forced to marry the Islamist gunmen, but only briefly for the sake of a nonsense argument that their forced sex does not constitute rape; children have been denied schooling and boys as young as 10 press-ganged into military training; pregnant women have been dragged in for questioning about their relationship with the father of their child - those who are not married have been beaten.

These are the stories told by refugees and in the absence of confirmation they too should be treated with the caution invoked this week by the executive director of Tufts University's World Peace Foundation, Alex de Waal, when he wrote: ''No doubt there is a hard core of international jihadists in the Sahara, but many players have an interest in exaggerating their threat.'' Yet in a phone interview with The New York Times, a man who identified himself as a senior figure in the Movement for Tawhid and Jihad in West Africa, an al-Qaeda offshoot, admitted to the barbaric treatment of petty thieves in the northern city of Gao - ''we cut their right hand and their left foot … It is not us who ordered this - it is God.''

At a recent briefing in Washington, the top US military commander for Africa, General Carter Ham, said al-Qaeda affiliates now operated terrorist training camps in Mali and were supplying Islamists in nearby Nigeria with arms, explosives and funds. ''As each day goes by, al-Qaeda and other organisations are strengthening their hold in northern Mali,'' he said. ''There is a compelling need for the international community, led by Africans, to address that.''

Diarra's ousting is likely to see the Islamists become more deeply entrenched in the north. Efforts to negotiate a resolution to the crisis have so far failed and moves are under way for a United Nations-endorsed military intervention.

Much remains to be resolved on the mechanics of and funding for the intervention. But the role of the Malian military in ousting Diarra has cast doubt on one of its few certainties - that the Mali military would have a key role. Much about the proposed intervention does not add up yet. The UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has approved the deployment of forces from several west African nations, but has hesitated to put the estimated $US70 million ($66 million ) for 3300 men on the table.

France, Mali's former colonial master, is in a hurry to move on the military front. But Washington - and Ban too - wants political reform and elections to be cornerstones in any strategy to defeat the extremists.

Meanwhile, regional power Algeria runs hot and cold on joining a military operation. Another local heavyweight, Nigeria, has too many problems of its own to be a sensible participant in any pushback against Islamists in Mali.

In the confusion, some see the intervention as inevitable. ''There is no alternative,'' Jack Christofides, a senior UN peacekeeping official, told The New York Times. ''For some of these more radical groups it's going to take military force.''